[In the following review, Ash acknowledges the pornographic and violent passages in Closer, but asserts that the work retains powerful and original writing.]

Although I'm sure he'd cringe at the thought, Dennis Cooper's bleak and brilliant novel of gay teens in the affluent Los Angeles wastelands could be read as a cautionary tale concerning the advisability of stricter parental supervision. Parents, find out what your son is doing with his buddies in that locked bedroom! According to Cooper, sodomy and drug-abuse are the least of it, which is why—unlike Less Than Zero—Closer will never be made into a movie, even though there are terrific parts for Robert Downey Jr. and other bratpackers. But things are permitted in writing that could never be enacted for commercial cinema, and readers with a passing acquaintance with Sade, Burroughs or Genet will probably be able to get through Cooper's account of relentlessly mechanistic couplings, coprophilia, voyeurism, mutilation and near-murder without losing their lunches. His characters are not so lucky; they vomit frequently and copiously.

Bodily wastes and fluids are a key to the ruling obsession of Closer. Cooper's lost angels and the older men who prey on them are utterly unable to come to terms with the human body. They are obsessed with the thought of what its beautiful, “airbrushed” exterior might conceal. It is the fractured reiterations of this two-note theme that lend Cooper's prose its peculiar, poetic intensity.

John (would-be artist with punk affectations) is dating George, the novel's haplessly passive central character. John feels something “that could have been love but it was too manageable and kind of coldly interesting,” and he is disturbed by the fact that, despite his “cuteness,” George is “just skin wrapped around some grotesque-looking stuff.” So much for the tender, romantic notions of the blank generation. David, who has paranoid fantasies of being an adored rock star (a kind of white, suburban Michael Jackson), worries that he's “just a bunch of blue tubes inside a skin wrapper.”

The only thing these boys are sure of is that they look good. Their alienation enables them—via Cooper's astonishing prose—to see themselves with absolute clarity: “My body's short, thin, but healthy. It hangs from my shoulders like a clean leotard.” David hates “the fact that human bodies are warm. I think they should be ice-cold or have no temperature whatsoever, like pieces of paper.”

George, with his roomful of pathetic Disney souvenirs, and his inarticulate grief over his dying mother, is the link between all these characters. He seems to understand nothing other than the fact that men find him attractive, and in consequence will submit to anything, almost including his own murder. His older French lover, Philippe, fantasizes about beauty and death: “This particular fantasy nagged him. He'd stroll through streets, eat, bathe, weed his rose garden. And it would gather strength over his head, an insidious halo, as black as dried blood, glittering with the thunder of snapping bones.” Philippe's psychopathic friend Tom plans the ultimate, ignorant investigation of the body, by opening it up and contemplating the entrails. Inevitably, Closer's climactic image is the crushed body of a young man. The unspeakable mysteries of the interior are finally exposed and the result “looks like a flower bed.” It is only at this point that someone belatedly calls out “Get help!” and the police arrive.

Edmund White has described this novel, in what may be a back-handed compliment, as being “as morally repugnant as it is esthetically seductive.” In fact, it is completely in keeping with American puritan values. It is puritanism that has made the natural functions of the body an enigma and a problem, puritanism that has forced a break between consciousness and sensation, and these are Cooper's central themes.

Like most “serious” novels that make extensive use of pornographic materials, Closer implies a surprisingly conventional moral stance. We are left in no doubt as to what the wages of sin might be—one lost boy ends up paralyzed from the waist down, another is killed, while our bemused hero finds something resembling true love. He does so in the arms of Steve, the only character in the novel who is capable of taking effective action to protect himself and his friends. He is also the pampered child of rich parents, and an ambitious young entrepreneur. He could thus be regarded as a typical, successful product of the Reagan years. If this casts some doubt on Cooper's iconoclastic credentials, there can be no doubt about the power and originality of his writing. Sheer force of style raise Closer to the level of (at least) a minor classic.